ANTIOCH — Talking faster than a dose of nicotine speeding to the brain, Victor De Noble had hundreds of young people hanging on his words this week as he galloped through an account of his career in the tobacco industry.

At Antioch’s Park Middle School on Tuesday, a multipurpose room full of normally fidgety seventh-graders sat up and took notice as the 58-year-old former research scientist offered them a glimpse of brains he had dissected and animatedly described how he went from working on a top-secret project for the largest cigarette manufacturer in the country to testifying against it.

“The story I’m going to tell you happens to be a true story,” De Noble began as he held aloft a small jar containing the brain of a laboratory rat, eliciting groans from the crowd.

De Noble’s appearance was part of a two-week tour of schools in central and east Contra Costa, including four in Antioch and Bay Point.

For the past 13 years Kaiser Permanente has enlisted De Noble as an ambassador for “Don’t Buy the Lie,” an anti-tobacco campaign targeting middle school students.

Instead of reiterating the dangers of smoking, however, he weaves facts about nicotine’s addictive power into an entertaining narrative chronicling his short-lived career with Philip Morris Co.

The idea is to present young people with the information and let them make up their own minds about tobacco use instead of boring them with messages they have heard many times, he explains.

“Rats! I love rats,” De Noble said as a photo of cages housing the subjects of his experiments appeared on a large projection screen.

It takes just seven seconds for nicotine to travel from the lungs to the heart to the brain, he said.

And once that happens, the user — whether it’s a rat, a monkey or a person — needs ever more frequent doses, De Noble said.

With repeated exposure to the drug, the part of the brain that registers pleasure actually changes, he added.

As such, the intense desire for nicotine lingers long after someone has quit smoking, De Noble said.

Excited shouts erupted when he later dons a latex glove and extracts from a jar half the brain of a middle-age man who had died of lung cancer as well as one of a Capuchin monkey he had introduced to nicotine during his research.

“EEUUUW!”

The squeamish shrank back as De Noble quickly circled the room with his putty-colored specimens, but scores of others shot up their hands begging for a closer look.

Although the irony might be lost on young listeners, De Noble now devotes his time to exposing the deceptive practices of the industry he once supported.

With a doctorate in physiological psychology, De Noble was studying the effects of drugs on animal behavior when Philip Morris recruited him in 1980 to work on a clandestine project.

His mission was to develop a substitute for nicotine that would create the same cravings without causing the high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks that company officials privately admitted were killing their customers.

The idea was to allay consumers’ health concerns by making cigarettes safer while retaining smokers who were already addicted and recruiting new ones.

Although De Noble succeeded, Philip Morris ultimately bowed to pressure from its legal counsel.

Attorneys feared that a safer cigarette would expose the company to lawsuits by contradicting its insistence that nicotine was not addictive.

So Philip Morris closed its lab in 1984 and fired De Noble, who later became a key witness in Congressional hearings that revealed facts about smoking that the country’s seven tobacco companies had suppressed.

Since 1994 De Noble has been on the lecture circuit full time, delivering his message to an estimated 550,000 people a year nationwide.

One of those was 12-year-old Joey Ulloa, a Park Middle School student who says he has not tried tobacco and has all the more reason not to after listening to De Noble.

“Before I didn’t think I wanted to smoke, but hearing him … made me not want to smoke more,” he said.